There’s a time for “Would you kindly,” and there’s also a time for “dick-tits.” There’s a time for open-ended missions where you use all your guile and stealth to penetrate the defenses of the Pope’s castle, and there's a time for blowing a giant alien’s head off and taking a dump in the hole that used to be its neck.
With the release of titles like Bulletstorm and Duke Nukem Forever (DNF) in the coming months, I think it’s safe to say that this spring will be a time for gratuitous, graphic violence and gruff, vulgar-mouthed protagonists rather than silent heroes struggling with nuanced existential crises. While I’m certain that these titles will be less the end of intelligent gaming as we know it and more mindless fun, one does begin to wonder whether they are symptoms of a larger problem.
Back during my film-studies days, I abhorred the taste of my fellow students as I’m sure they had equal disdain for mine. Film students can be some of the most pretentious, obnoxious, hypocritical scumbags on a college campus at any given time. They have a unique ability common to many annoying undesirables you’re bound to run across in the world: the power of being able to hold two contradictory viewpoints on a given subject without sounding insane.
They’ll trash you for watching the Academy Awards because they're fixed and biased towards Americans, and if you really want to know what a good film is you should be watching Ingmar Bergman. Then the next day, you’ll find them first in line for the theatrical re-release of Avatar in 3D. Shortly after explaining, condescendingly, why Jean-Luc Godard is the greatest director of all eternity, they’ll preorder Saw XXIV on Amazon. They’ll call Quentin Tarantino a conceited hack while standing on the curb next to an indie theater running a late-night screening of Pulp Fiction. Get the picture?
The problem that I had with these kids wasn’t their specific tastes but their attitudes towards the preferences of others. They never seemed to realize that good taste and impeccable taste aren’t the same thing. That’s why my Criterion Collection DVDs of obscure foreign art films can sit on the shelf right beside my Jackass box set. There’s a time and a place for everything.
Back in the 1970’s, so called B-movies with low budgets, terrible dialogue, and gratuitous sex and violence had cult followings. Fast forward three or four decades and you have high-budget Hollywood tributes like Grindhouse, complete with a double feature and an intermission with fake trailers for other similar films. The idea of an Academy Award-winning screenwriter working on a film of this caliber was a unique novelty. The crowd I saw it with loved it — it was a truly entertaining experience. Soon after, there came talks of making the fake trailers into other movies, and all the novelty wore off.
This kind of ironic love for all things terrible gets old after a while. While some of my friends clamored for the release of Machete, I met it not with elitist condescension but with an apathetic, indifferent sigh. Sadly, this phenomena isn’t unique to film — you can find it in the gaming world, and it’s just as pronounced if not more prominent. Sometimes it feels like mindless fun, and other times it feels like a horrible infection that’s spreading across the entire medium.
Like any infection, this one has symptoms. The most readily recognizable is dialogue. Dialogue can make or break a game. Try to imagine what Mass Effect would be like without its revolutionarily intuitive dialogue trees. Or worse yet, imagine if all of the options on that wheel were lowest common denominators like “dick-tits” or something as equally obsessed with the adolescent humor that finds our private parts so hilarious. Instead of talking Wrex down from going berserk outside Saren’s breeding facility, what if you just called him an asshole? What if Ezio’s intimate romance scenes or the Christina missions in the Writer’s Guild Award-winning Assassin’s Creed had turned out to be more like the quick-time events in God of War?
My fears might be unfounded. After all, there usually seems to be a pretty clear line between titles like Bioshock and gore fests like Duke Nukem. By no means am I advocating an end to such titles. As I’ve said many times before, there’s a time and a place for everything. I think that Bulletstorm’s irreverent marketing campaign is hilarious, and it’s lampooned some of my favorite titles. Shoe’s tweets about his escapades at the DNF event made it sound like a hell of a time.
Many gamers are calling into question the relevance of characters like Duke. Others wonder if the novelty of a game like Bulletstorm is going to wear thin after a couple of hours — if that. These are good questions to ask, and I’m glad I’m not the only one musing over their implications. All seriousness aside, I’m sure that I’m just being paranoid and that games like this are seen for what they are: mindless fun. Still, sometimes you have to wonder. One of the first narrative films, Georges Méliès A Trip to the Moon, is a triumph of special effects and human imagination. One of the first modern shooters featured a cyborg Hitler. We might need to watch ourselves.